Looking up!

Dear Family,
So this week has been the best week as far as progress and new exciting things go. We were able to see a part member family come to church and prior in the week managed to get a baptism date set with the Father in the family. After sacrament meeting they had lots of questions and seemed to us that they really could feel the Spirit as everyone in the Ward bore testimony about the Restoration and to me it seemed like each testimony had something that the Father needed to hear. The whole family was excited for this week and we have set up appointments with them every couple of days. Its been really amazing to see this explosion of enthusiasm and we have just felt wonderful about their decision. Along with teaching this family we spent lots of time trying to find new people to teach, going through old investigators that other missionaries had taught along with knocking on a good number of neighborhoods. We are also getting excited, for in about two weeks from now, Elder Perkins from the first Quorum of the Seventy is coming to visit our Stake. So that should be pretty exciting. Apparently the missionaries in my zone ( New Orleans zone) have been invited or volunteered ( probably the latter) to sing at a Martin Luther King Jr celebration. We will be having choir practice every Saturday, so that seems to be something that will be a bit different. The weather here today is quite unpleasant and tomorrow is probably going to be about the same. The good news is that it should only last a couple days and then be back into the sixties. We have a baptism in the Ward this Saturday so we are starting to make preparations for that. The sister missionaries are the ones who have been teaching the young girl and the rest of her family is less active and starting to come to church. One really sweet thing that happened this week was a less active member who we visit occasionally gave each of us 50 dollar gift cards to a nice restaurant so we have been looking forward to eating there. We have been getting fed way more and generally now have a meal appointment every night. We seem to have had just a really great week and now we are hoping we can keep the momentum up and have another good week coming up! Our only concern is the super cold weather!
Love Elder Smith